UTSA students get schooled on music marketing

Industry is changing fast, so are graduates' expectations

Published 5:08 pm, Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Greg Griffin woke up Tuesday morning and put on a navy blazer with a yellow shirt and patterned tie, diamond studs in his ears.

"Give her your CD," his mother told him as he left the house. "If she listens to it, she listens to it. If she doesn't, at least you tried."

Griffin, a 24-year-old hip-hop artist and music marketing major at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was preparing for a class visit from Judy Libow, former vice president for radio promotions at Atlantic Records and founder of Libow Unlimited Inc., a music promotion and artist development company.

Libow, who has helped launch multiplatinum bands such as AC/DC and Foreigner, graciously took Griffin's CD and gave the class of around 60 students a peek into an industry that has drastically changed since her heyday, forcing education to adapt along with it.

Though recorded music is everywhere, students will graduate into a world where its value is in free fall and major record labels are bleeding money, said Matthew Dunne, coordinator of UTSA's music marketing program.

"They are not going to walk into a major-label job," Dunne said. "I tell them, 'Everyone is an entrepreneur, and you have to think like an entrepreneur.'"

To drive the lesson home, Dunne pushes students to take on real-life projects, such as a battle of the bands contest that students organized last year at Blue Star Brewing Co.

This year, Libow came up with the idea to get students involved in promoting her latest discovery, country musician David Bradley. Zach Keen, a 22-year-old senior, worked with Libow and Bradley all semester to drum up interest in Bradley's music, culminating in a concert at UTSA on Wednesday evening.

"It was really hands-on; I worked with Judy and David directly," said Keen, an aspiring concert promoter. Libow "just showed me that there is a lot of hard work, and sometimes there isn't much pay at all, just to get your sound out there."

Because most of Dunne's students also are aspiring musicians, they listened intently to Libow and Bradley at Tuesday's class, asking questions about how to get exposure for their music and whether they should even bother trying to get a record deal.

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"If you want to be competitive, you have to look at what's available to you, understand the options and be creative and aggressive," Libow said.

In the old days, major labels made nobodies into superstars by getting them played on the radio, and they raked in profits from album sales and publishing rights, Libow said.

These days, CD sales are in the tank, commercial radio is no longer receptive to breaking new acts and profit is derived chiefly from live performances and merchandise, she said.

But the upside is that creative control has returned to the artist, and new technologies allow artists to cultivate a fan base themselves through Facebook, MySpace and Internet radio stations such as Pandora.

"People love the idea of being in on the ground floor," Libow said. "They want to be a part of the success story."

That success story might not be superstardom, but it could mean making a decent living as an independent artist.

"There is something to be said for waking up every day and doing something you love," said Bradley, a Briton who used to work in oil fields in Siberia and Kazakhstan before moving to Nashville, Tenn., to pursue a career in music.

Griffin, the hip-hop artist, took that message to heart.

"What I got from this is to keep going no matter what," Griffin said. "Everything is going to line up when it lines up. There was a reason for me to be here and hear this."